Musings on computers and software as I continue learning and sharing software development knowledge.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

On finding loopholes through visualization

Sometimes, visualization provides you with insight that is not instantly available. for example, I was playing with the open data that Indian Government provides for irrigation methods in different districts of India, and here's the aggregate data:

The visualization above lists all the power sources used for irrigation across India. In most of the states, this was coming similar to what was expected (such as larger use of solar pumps and windmills in Gujarat and Rajasthan), but there were few anomalies too, like in the display below:

This information is obviously incorrect as someone has erroneously or lazily set all the non manual sources for irrigation to the Other/uncategorized source and thus, this set of data becomes inconsistent with the rest of the data.

Being on the information highway (with Right To Information) is important for India, but still there is still to go before we are able to make this data comprehensive enough for forecasting and predicting useful outcomes.